Personally I think the Internet is extremely good, and it is television that is bad. The Internet only got bad when people from The Television moved in and started using it.
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@mcc there's a well documented feedback loop between right-wing social media and fox news. fox news picks emerging talking points from niche corners of social media, amplifies them, and then those are the ones that diffuse out to most right-wing media consumers. there's no equivalent for liberals or the left (or there wasn't ten years ago when the analysis I'm thinking of was done)
@bob i think the more interesting thing on the right would be to draw a line all the way back to the "direct mail" networks in the 70s that helped build the Reagan revolution. If you look at early radio, direct mail, 90s talk radio, blogs, email forwards, social media, the far right is typically extremely good at adapting to new media and the left almost always plays catchup. TikTok is the only emerging form I can think of where the left was on an equal footing, and Biden/Ellison ended that.
@bob One thing that does interest me is Fox was trying to put a finger on the scales with both the blogosphere and the email forwards eras of right-wing Internet communication, but it didn't really "move onto" the Internet wholesale until Twitter, and the right didn't really own the Internet until around that same period. I can't tell if it's a coincidence that's the same time as the harassment campaigns.
@mcc the left and the libertarians did compete on equal footing in the late 90s, but the left didn't have any ability to organize outside of the internet and liberals always wished the internet would go away. liberals are just really attached to existing institutions and aren't willing to lean into the disruptive new thing like the right is.
@mcc A part of me wants to say that the Internet is good but social media is bad...but then I remembered Penny Arcade described this problem in 2004. Things only got a lot worse since then.
@mcc I definitely miss the days when going online and communicating with people I'd never met meant regular people called me a weirdo.
People with the same kind of attitude might now think I'm weird now for not posting up my opinions on facebook.
@mcc I'm willing to consider this viewpoint.